Developer: Big Fish Games
Steam Release: August 2006
Hours Played: 5.5
Similar To: Luxor Evolved / Sparkle 2 / Zuma's Revenge
Rating: 2/5 Parsnips
Luxor and Zuma fans will feel right at home with this one as this is a marble popping match 3 game where a chain of balls slowly follow a path to freedom. Your job is to stop them by controlling a ship that moves left and right along the bottom of the screen and to fire at the chain to link up 3 or more of the corresponding colour. Doing so causes the marbles to disappear in a small explosion. You keep blasting away until all the spheres have been cleared but if they reach the exit, you lose. One click fires the ball upwards while the other swaps the ball with the second one lined up beneath. Everything can be controlled with the mouse. In a twist on the Zuma and Luxor games, ASP has fixed targets on the screen that must also be removed to complete the level.
As you progress more annoying moving barriers are put in the way to make life difficult for you. For variety, after every five levels or so there is a bonus level. This involves shooting at large coloured circular asteroids that float around while you avoid the metallic ones. Once split into its smallest size the asteroids turn into coins that fall downwards and which you must then collect with your ship. Coins can then be used later at the upgrade screen (which pops up after finishing a level) to be spent on enhancements. Various power-up balls pop up from time to time to keep the action dynamic and clearing a screen is usually not too difficult to do. I cleared all 111 levels in little more than 5 hours with just a couple of failures. There are scores and stats but these mean little as the real pleasure of the game comes mainly from just ploughing through it.
You have a user-friendly set-up to start with, with options giving you the basic tweaks to do with the sound and whether to run the game in windowed mode or not. Hitting Play takes you to the map where you simply hit Start to begin; press Menu to return to the menu screen. You get a screen to upgrade such things as speed and accuracy but that's about it. It’s all intuitive, quick and easy to use. The newspaper that occasionally twirls around to give headline news about exploration, zeppelins, travel and whatnot bring stories like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers to mind while adding that 1950s / post World War 2 vibe. However, the resolution of the game is fixed so the image is not exactly super-sharp. The soundtrack consists of a subtle, jogging tune that makes you want to continue your journey while the sound effects are pretty unmemorable.
Unlike Zuma Deluxe which has a confusing and counter-intuitive progress system, with ASP you know exactly where you stand. There is a map of the world with a path of 111 dots that each represent a level and you move along at your own pace, one dot at a time, after each successful completion. Still, although this allows the player to know where they are in the game, it doesn't allow the player to redo levels or beat any sort of score (not that you'd really want to). Yes, you are given stats at the end of each stage but, like so many games, these stats are not stored so are effectively useless and irrelevant. As mentioned, unless you are super-nerdy and want to give the stats importance by writing them down, the real fun of the game is in ploughing through the levels.
CONCLUSION
Completely overshadowed by the Zuma and Luxor series of
games, this little known number is the pretender that sits in the
background. It has exactly the same gameplay as those better-known
giants and could probably be passed
over in favour of those that have a stronger grip on the genre. However, if you want a five or six hour diversion that involves just blasting away at yer balls then ASP will answer that call. It's straightforward, quite fun and won't really require much brain power - ideal when you might be a bit tired and not up to anything too heavy. It may not be entirely classed as a 2d shooter and does hail from the Big Fish Games studios so is not strictly indie but is entirely casual and kind of fits the mould so I’ve included it amongst my Top 500. It's a 45MB download so it’ll download and be ready to play quick as a flash.
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